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I'm new to automatic deployment and would like guidance from experts on the the best way to efficiently deploy approximately 75 vms (both windows and linux vms) on 7 vmware esxi 5.5 hosts (All hosts are at the same site) .

The hosts may be insatlled manually because 7 hosts is not a large number; even though suggestions for automating this step are greatly appreciated.

What tools would you suggest to efficiently deploy a mix of windows and linux vms ? Can Microsoft's SCVMM achieve this ? What alternatives are suggested ?

Thanks in advance.

joebegborg07
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  • Do you just want to deploy images or do configuration management on the hosts as well? – mzhaase Nov 30 '16 at 09:10
  • Ideally deploy images, but deploying multiple stock OSs to VMs would also save me alot of time when compared with manually deploying vms. – joebegborg07 Nov 30 '16 at 09:30
  • I assume you use vCenter, in which case you could do it with the vCenter API, simply configure a template. Problem with config management is that for example AD does not work with linux of course. I know that puppet has a powershell module, so you could use that to do everything both on linux and windows. – mzhaase Nov 30 '16 at 09:34
  • Have you looked at Chef? https://www.chef.io/ Infrastructure as Code might be what you are looking for? Also look into PowerCLI. That is VMware's implementation of PowerShell. – Tim Haintz Nov 30 '16 at 10:25
  • @TimHaintz I was after something with a GUI – joebegborg07 Nov 30 '16 at 20:24

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